The Wind A Calliope Breathing (part I)
“The clock makes mayhem at midnight.” Charlotte slumped in the doorway, collapsed into the frame, a loosed marionette. Charlotte was a world class sloucher.
I struggled to comprehend her words. “What’s the clock doing at midnight?” My tongue was wet cement.
Charlotte spun a yoyo down a length of string. “Making mayhem.” The yoyo hit bottom, paused a beat, began the bounce back up.
“What does that mean?” My lips were rubber bands.
“It means what it means. You dig?”
“I don’t. What’s your point?”
“The point is there is no point. You are who you are, life blows how it blows. It‘s all a big accident.”
I had zero comprehension. My head was a fog. “What does any of that have to do with the clock making mayhem at midnight?”
“It don’t.”
“And that’s your point?”
“There is no point.”
“And that’s your point?!” Thought I finally had it.
This time she whispered. “There is no point.”
A puff of spores, she was out the door. I stared after the empty space. Dwelled on what she’d said. Landed on the fact that it meant nothing.
I went back to putting my teeth in a row on the table, smallest to largest, left to right, back into an order I could live with. Back from the brink of a chaos that began to rear when I bumped the table’s edge earlier that afternoon, sailing bicuspids into molars, premolars into carnassials, scattering tusks like marbles over the glass landscape.
I was working row three when a series of loud crashes broke my focus: wooden spoons banging lawlessly on repurposed pots and pans. The beat: “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves. Good song. Not in the mood.
Charlotte had likely grown bored, her default mood, and determined to create her own entertainment, the entertaining element being less about her love of music, more about bothering yours truly. She found it amusing to pollute my concentration.
I stalked through the hall. Passed three paintings, each more pornographic and deviant than the last. Freshly hung, newly minted, post-contemporary outrage. Aimed at getting my goat.
Hit the kitchen: found broken dishes and unspooled spaghetti strewn haphazardly over the walls and ceiling. A Pollock splatter of meat sauce and entrails. Still warm.
Charlotte had smashed every last one of my bowls and plates before sailing my supper through the air as a grand finale. Then hijacked my pot to play Ringo.
I heard her rhythm kick in again down the other end of the hall. “Sets the summer sun on fire.” Nice sentiment, bad timing.
I decided to stay in the kitchen. Clean up her nihilism.
I could not recall when Charlotte first arrived here, how I initially knew her or where she came from. The film fluttered in the capstan. The world flickered. My memory was meringue.
Mopped the floor and scrubbed the meat mural. Wiped away the traces of her latest catastrophe.
She appeared over my shoulder, an overstuffed Cuban cigar jutting from her obnoxious clench. She raised her eyebrows and offered “What’s up, fuck-stick?” as a friendly greeting.
“Why do you do this?” I asked.
“Do what, Doc?”
“Make these messes. Why do you make these god damned messes?”
“You need these messes, Doc.” She kissed my cheek. Then punched me in the back.
Charlotte disappeared from the kitchen and popped up almost instantaneously on the other side of the house. I could hear her dragging a tin cup back and forth across the cast iron stair case. My cool detachment thinned. I craved retreat.
I resorted to my standard quick-fix: I chopped three pills into fifteen pieces. Crushed each piece into a thousand granules. Cut the granules into three even lines. Ingested.
Fell into the sofa, cozy and serene. Dusk broke over The Edge of Night. Charlotte’s mischief dissolved to a beautifully nondescript dissonance. Television noise gave way to the soft swell of sounds fading in from the outside world. All noises began to blend. An earful of trails and echoes.
I stared into the coiling noir that meandered the house each night after sunset. Twisting through hallways, a black snuffleupagus, it cast a menagerie of shadows on the walls: a sick gaggle of nefarious little creeps crawling across my pupils as I slipped helplessly into narcotic sleep. I watched as it wound its way back to the attic where it nested.
A discordant howl. A backwards guitar. The death of bebop.
I wondered about the world outside. What may have happened to it since I had last participated in its rhymes and rhythms.
I sometimes stood with my eyes closed in the center of my living room, hands at my hips, pretending the world had ended, destroyed by weapon or natural disaster, and that I was the only one left. Sole survivor, the last man standing. I was strangely comforted by this scenario.
A steady stream of commercials and crickets, my concréte lullaby was occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of new Charlotte-engineered cacophonies: a vase exploding against the floor, a power drill forcing holes through my Hugo Balls, Charlotte’s monkey-wrench making mincemeat of the downstairs plumbing. These noises tumbling in and out of freewheeling half-dreams.
The clock struck twelve. I snapped back to the table to continue arranging my teeth. To the rhythm of “Are Friends Electric?” Pleasantly robotic. What I wouldn’t give to live in a synth-pop world. To live with that kind of precision and perfection.
An explosion on the east end of the house. Rocked debris from the ceiling and rattled my teeth. What the fuck she could have done to cause such a sizable blast was beyond me, but I had to know.
Raced the length and confronted a red glow coming from just outside the kitchen window. A smell like burning leaves. A smack of soft corruption. A wink of casual self-destruction.
Bottle rocket whistle, short silence, BOOM! Another earsplitting burst in the close neighborhood perimeter. I staggered back from the kitchen window, heard a building collapse next door. Something decidedly disorderly was happening, and I was fighting to keep myself together.
